Your Country is Required to Implement This in the Paris Agreement

Friday, January 13, 2017

The Paris Agreement on climate change was adopted in COP21
and reflects a collective vision by 95 countries on ways to curb global warming
and other undesirable climate changes. The agreement lays a framework of
essential goals and important milestones to achieving a green environment.
However, the success of the agreement depends on the rules, guidelines, and
processes that are adapted to making the agreement work. An ad hoc Working
Group on Paris Agreement (APA) that is made up of the parties that ratified and
adopted the agreement is putting these rules and processes in place. The group
is supported by such organizations as UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) and Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA)

Much of the work should have been completed before the full
implementation of the agreement and well before 2020 when parties to the
agreement meet and go through the progress.

Here are key areas
that parties have to focus on to ensure that the agreement works and within the
set timelines

There must be
guidance for states to increase their ambition

There are critical processes that have been put into the
agreement to help companies increase their ambition in enhancing their climate
plans. Countries are expected to come up with Nationally Determined
Contributions every five years to achieve long-term goals of the
agreement.

Ensure accountability
and transparency

The backbone of the
Paris Agreement is a transparency framework to help track how governments are
progressing with the commitment to enhance a green environment. However, there
must be rules to hold the parties accountable while enhancing the understanding
among these countries. A key item towards the achievement of this goal is the
enhancement of UNFCCC current Monitoring Reporting and Verification (MRV) system
by 2018.

Climate finance must
be tracked

The core challenge for the international climate control
regime is to ensure that climate finance is flowing towards the intended
recipients and meeting the intended objectives The SBSTA is tasked with the role
of developing the accounting rules for the parties, which should be done by
2018. The goal of the agreement is to encourage reporting every two years for
easy reviewing.

Create New Technology
Framework

The long-term vision of the agreement is the development of
new technologies and the transfer of these technologies from the developed
parties to the developing countries to aid them in mitigating the effects of
climate change and adapting to it. The challenge in this is that the timelines
have not been set and some parties do not want to share their technologies.

A committed focus in these four areas will keep each country and entity that is collaborating accountable to each other for the long term common good.